Noninvasive ultrasonic characterization of the skin is an attractive modality that has potential importance in a number of areas including the study of wound healing, the characterization of burns, and monitoring of skin diseases such as scleroderma. Presently existing medical ultrasonic instruments are surprisingly deficient in their capability to accurately interrogate the first few millimeters of tissue. Although the most accessible "organ" in the body, skin represents a challenging imaging goal. This proposal is directed toward developing new techniques for analyzing the structure of skin with ultrasound. The approach chosen utilizes gated bursts of sound at frequencies between 20 and 100 megahertz and deconvolution of the received echo. These techniques are applied to the assessment of surgical wound healing and for the characterization of burns.